Dipika Kohli
By Dipika Kohli
It was a weekday. Thursday, I think. Sunny, but not too hot. Just after-lunch rush, so, thinning traffic and a spontaneous idea. This is a good time for a drive. Or, well, a tuk tuk ride because I do not drive in Phnom Penh.
Get out a bit, some fresh air. Sometimes I do that; opting to back out of the everyday routines to go and see something new. This is an old habit, the wanting to go and investigate. But still, there’s a practical reason, too. It’s loud: next door is under construction, and it looks like a new development is set to get refurbished, too, next to that apartment-building-in-progress. So, maybe let me take a break from all of this and review it after getting a bit of space. Some distance, some time away, to get out from under the alley’s ambient noise. Head off to a place that’s not unfamiliar, but one I rarely visit; it’s a little out of the way, just a bit, from Phnom Penh. Hailing a tuk-tuk now, yes, thank you, and here we go.
On my way.
For… a while.
A lot longer than the last time I remembered going to the outpost for people who want to co-work or have lunch meetings or visit someone’s office, a kind of complex or campus, that used to be more interesting before Covid. Still, it’s a place to go. Wasn’t it closer? Maybe there’s road construction to be avoided. Surely that’s it.
Ten minutes passed, maybe more. Less dense now, with few small concrete buildings, and now, only every so often. Then, only fields. I don’t remember this. But okay. That’s nothing new. I’ve done this before; I’ve taken left turns, wound up in places unexpectedly, sheer veers.
I mentioned this last month in my article, but adventuring, for me, has been off the table ever since border closures kept me in Vietnam starting from March 2020. A total of twenty months went by before I left; some part of that was my choice, some of it was lockdown rules in Ho Chi Minh City being what they were, as in, rather harsh, but all in all it was a kind of a foray into the unknown, too. You turned left, and then left again, and maybe wandered some, and then before you knew it you were way far from the familiar, quite apart, and moving right along down what seemed dark-at-first and maybe scary, but, also, at other times, soothingly quiet corridors of solitude.
This Phnom Penh excursion was not dissimilar. An old feeling of wonder at the wander twinged, for the first time in many months. I’d mentioned India, last time I wrote here, and an inkling I might try that next. But this ‘trip’ was me just going outside my neighborhood. It’s not that often I leave the city center, and now we were on a national road. Very straight with increasing velocity. It sure felt familiar, kind of reminiscent, in feeling, of how it was to buckle in for the long haul to Bangkok on a bus or Siem Reap in a minivan. So many tours were taken, through these regions, before Covid.
On this day, before making the very important motion to signal to the tuk-tuk driver that I think we should look at a map, I tried to enjoy the reflection. Travel. I remember now.
But also, for some reason, this jaunt felt like I was in… North Carolina.
Details popped up from reserves of memories. Another place, another time, another highway: Highway 70. Be-bopping along, passing cotton fields, putting in your favorite… cassette. So many trips, so much crisscrossing on those roads, too. But in North Carolina, it was not a tuk-tuk: it was me, in a car. Me, driving. To and from.
I used to drive up so many times, into Raleigh’s outer perimeter, and see that city’s skyline, from a distance. This is fun, anywhere. Arterial corridors delivering traffic from the outskirts of cities right into their hearts.
Denser now, as you get closer in. Like coming into Delhi, on the trains from Rajasthan. Like coming up to Ho Chi Minh City on the bus. I remember in HCMC how people I’d met would talk about that; they were from the countryside, they’d say, but even with all the traffic in the city, they kind of liked the energy. The ‘bustle.’ It was the word that got translated for me, on their phones. In this, we had something in common. In the center of the city, you can reinvent yourself. Some people say that’s what moving to a foreign country can do; give you an opportunity to start all over.
Driving into, or away from, a place that’s not a giant megalopolis like Tokyo, but is not-too-small, either, for me creates this particular click. A comfortable coziness at the recognition of a familiar skyline, to remind you where you are. Before it might have been a night bus into Kyoto. A plane touching down at Sea-Tac. Other places, other arrivals… Raleigh. That was one of them, too.
Here I am in Phnom Penh. Recalling all of this, right up until the moment my tuk tuk turns right, onto my alley, and pulls up to the gate of where I live.
Finding my way back, too, is as big a part of any trip.
Dipika Kohli is an author who is based in Phnom Penh. Discover her books at kismuth.com and other projects at dipikakohli.com.
